When I’m working open days as an ambassador for the School for Business and Society in the Church Lane Building, the one thing that’s always asked by prospective students is “what should I expect?”. As social policy is a subject not offered at GCSE or A-level, it is new to many people. This blog will detail what I wish I knew before studying social policy at York!
A typical week in the life
The “jump” from post-16 education, like A-levels and BTECs, to a degree is often spoken about. But until I got to university, I didn’t really know what that meant. From day one, the value of independent study at university was obvious, especially since I only have 9 hours of timetabled sessions per week!
For my degree, in Criminal Justice and Social Policy, I usually have 3 two-hour-long lectures and 3 one-hour-long seminars. This is a pretty standard timetable for most students at university. At York, it is recommended that students do 10 hours of work per credit,and each module is 20 credits. Although it sounds like unlimited free time, the rest of my week is usually taken up by:
- Completing pre-seminar tasks
- Keeping up with set readings
- Working on assessments
This is, of course, not the case every week. Some weeks I may have personal supervisor meetings or extracurricular activities- but more on that later! Before starting my degree, I wish I knew that everyone approaches independent study differently, but what works for me is treating university like a 9-5. I find that dedicating that time to getting all my work done means I can truly relax on evenings. Whether this is by socialising or watching a film, without the guilt of feeling like I’ve got a million things to do!
Learning from the people who wrote the books!
One of my favourite things about studying at a research-intensive university is that the people who teach you are the people who literally wrote the books you are learning from. I genuinely didn’t know this until I was sitting in my very first lecture and heard the lecturer citing himself!
As someone who went to a different university before coming to York, this has had a huge impact on my learning experience. My lecturers and seminar leaders are incredibly passionate about their research. If I have a question or don’t understand something, who better to ask than the person who wrote the material?
The community comes with the degree
Something that I love about my degree in particular is that it is quite a small cohort– there’s only 10 of us! While this is of course great for contact time with academics, it also led to instant friendships with my peers on my course. Making these friendships was amazing, but it was hard to get to know each other in timetabled sessions due to the work focused nature. We really made friends by joining the Social Policy Society.
I mentioned earlier that another thing you may fit into your schedule are extracurricular activities. For university students, these often take the form of societies. The Social Policy Society was a great place to make proper friends on my course. It also connected me with others in years above me who had already done the modules I was doing!
The society balances academic events, like talks from professionals who work in social policy and workshops run by charities in the sphere, with socials, like pub quizzes and bar crawls. Something I wish I knew before starting at York was that this society existed, so I could have joined sooner!
Thanks for reading!
Em
Read more student stories about studying Social Policy at York.
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